In this and subsequent posts, I will push back against certain aspects of this conventional wisdom. At the outset, however, I want to be very clear about what I am NOT arguing. I am not arguing that the current legal job market is great – it is not. I am also not arguing in defense of the status quo in legal education – as I’ve explained in prior posts (here, here, here, and here), I worry about many facets of legal education, not least the student debt problems caused by ever-increasing tuition.
In this post, I will argue that it is highly likely that more recent graduates throughout the country are getting law jobs than the conventional wisdom assumes. My argument will be based on data about what graduates from my school actually are doing now. In my next post, I will briefly discuss the claim that the poor job market is due to structural changes in the legal job market. [Update: the second post is here]. I will explain why I am skeptical that the structural changes in the legal job market are significantly different than those that have occurred in the past, and why I am therefore skeptical that the current anemic state of the legal job market is the result of structural, rather than economic, factors. In my third post, I will briefly discuss Bureau of Labor Statistics data on the legal job market, and will explain why caution must be used in interpreting this data in discussion of legal employment. [Update: the third post is here].
If you want to see the entire series of blog posts now, I have collected them in this document. The rest of the first post is below the fold.
As some readers may know, Widener has two law school campuses, one in Harrisburg, PA and one in Wilmington, DE. I’m on the Harrisburg faculty, and the study is of Harrisburg graduates. I chose to focus on Harrisburg exclusively because the Harrisburg class sizes are significantly smaller, making it easier to do as thorough a study as possible. Focusing on Harrisburg also makes the study more accurate because I know many of the alumni personally. I don’t have any reason to believe that the outcomes for our Wilmington campus would be substantially different, but I want to be clear that I have been looking exclusively at Harrisburg campus graduates.
The goal of my study was to find accurate employment data on each graduate. I worked on the study with research assistants and our faculty secretaries. We began with a list of the graduates from each class. We had some existing employment data, but we sought publicly-verifiable employment information for each person. The listings of lawyers admitted to practice maintained by state bar associations were especially helpful. As an example of how these sites work, you can go to the directory maintained by the Pennsylvania Bar Disciplinary Board and put in my name. You will be able to find basic information, including my current employer and phone number. At least two people independently searched for information for each graduate, and we followed up on any inconsistencies. If there was no publicly-available information for a particular graduate, we tried to contact that person individually. I’m sure that the results of our study are not perfect, but I am confident that we have developed a reasonably accurate snapshot of current employment for these alumni.
In the end, we were able to find solid job data on most of the graduates from each of these two classes. We couldn’t find solid data on 7.7% of the graduates. We hope to find data on these people as we progress. We included the missing people in our totals, so they are counted in the percentages that I report below. In other words, if we did not find solid data for a person, that person is effectively treated as unemployed in our percentages. I’d make an educated guess that at around half of these people are employed in good jobs, but we took a conservative approach and assumed unemployment unless we had good data that proved otherwise.
The following table summarizes the results of our preliminary study, using the categories used by NALP and the ABA. The corresponding nine-month data is provided for each class.
|
2010 – 9 month |
2010 – Current |
2011 – 9 month |
2011 – Current |
|
|
Bar Pass Required – Permanent |
58 (47.5%) |
99 (80.4%) |
58 (46.8%) |
92 (74.1%) |
|
Bar Pass Required – Non-Permanent |
11 (9.0%) |
0 (0.0%) |
2 (1.6%) |
2 (1.6%) |
|
JD Advantage |
10 (8.2%) |
8 (6.5%) |
18 (14.5%) |
8 (6.5%) |
|
Professional |
12 (9.8%) |
6 (4.9%) |
10 (8.0%) |
8 (6.5%) |
|
Non-Professional |
1 (0.8%) |
0 (0.0%) |
6 (4.8%) |
2 (1.6%) |
|
Employed – Undeterminable |
1 (0.8%) |
0 (0.0%) |
1 (0.8%) |
0 (0.0%) |
|
Graduate Study |
6 (4.9%) |
0 (0.0%) |
1 (0.8%) |
0 (0.0%) |
|
Unemployed |
16 (13.1%) |
1 (0.8%) |
21 (16.9%) |
2 (1.6%) |
|
Unknown/Unlocatable/Insufficient Information |
7 (5.7%) |
9 (7.3%) |
7 (5.4%) |
10 (8.1%) |
I should note that the 2010 Nine Month numbers reflect 122 graduates while the 2010 Current numbers reflect 123 graduates. The discrepancy is due to one student who finished her third year at our Delaware campus, leading to some confusion about where she should be counted. There were 124 graduates in the class of 2011.
I should also note that the current numbers include some jobs that could cause underemployment concerns. For example, the Bar Pass Required numbers include solo practitioners. I will provide a further breakdown of this data below, and talk further about underemployment issues. Before I do that, I first want to talk about the comparison between the study data and the nine-month data.
What Nine-Month Job Data Does, and Does Not, Tell Us
The data from my study is significantly different from the nine-month data for each class. This should not be surprising, because the two sets of numbers reflect different time periods. The nine-month survey reports employment nine months after graduation. My study is reporting employment now – almost three years after graduation for the class of 2010 and almost two years after graduation for the class of 2011.
It makes sense that the data taken later in time is more positive on employment than the nine-month data. Some people who don’t have jobs after nine months get jobs later. Indeed, the timing of the bar exam makes it likely that at least some students will get jobs more than nine months after graduation. A student who graduates in May might not get bar results until five months after graduation. Employers often wait for bar results to come out to hire new lawyers, and students sometimes don’t even start searching for jobs until after they find out they pass the bar. (For the record, this isn’t a good approach).
Some students fail the bar the first time. It should not be surprising that you can’t get a job as a lawyer without passing the bar. Roughly half of these students will pass on the second time, but will not be admitted to the bar until more than nine months after graduation. To illustrate this point, consider a jurisdiction with an 85% first time pass rate. 15% of graduates will fail the bar the first time. If 50% of these graduates pass the second time, then an additional 7.5% (50% of the 15% who failed the first time) of the graduates will be admitted to the bar almost a year after they graduate. In jurisdictions with lower first-time pass rates, the proportional increase in graduates able to practice over time will be even more pronounced.
As an aside, I note that many California schools dropped in this year’s U.S. News rankings. It may be that this drop is due to increased emphasis on nine month job data in the rankings. Because of California’s low bar pass rate, fewer graduates of California schools are admitted to the bar nine months after graduation than in most other jurisdictions. If, as I suggest, bar timing is contributing to lower job numbers, then California schools are being punished in the U.S. News rankings for California’s low bar pass rate. (For the record, like most legal professionals, I think that the U.S. News rankings are deeply flawed.).
I would also note that the distortion caused in the legal job market by bar exam timing was one of my major motivations in proposing that students be allowed to take the bar exam in the summer after their second year of law school. Regardless of the current state of the job market, students would benefit from being able to start work earlier if they had already passed the bar exam when they graduate from law school.
None of this is to say that nine-month numbers are not useful or important. They provide an important snapshot of graduate employment. It is perfectly reasonable for students comparing schools to look at nine-month data. It is also reasonable to look at changes in nine-month data over time to track changes in the legal job market over time.
It is not reasonable, however, to treat the nine-month numbers as the final word on employment for a particular class of graduates. Consider three types of claims that could be made about the nine-month data:
(1) The nine month data for schools around the country are lousy compared to prior years. Therefore there is at least some evidence that the legal job market is lousy as compared to prior years.
(2) School X consistently has better nine-month job numbers than School Y. Therefore, School X tends to have better job placement than School Y.
(3) The nine month data show that only X% of graduates of a particular class got legal jobs. Therefore, only X% of that class ever got legal jobs.
The first two claims are fair. The third claim is not, but claims of this form have become increasingly common in commentary on law schools. As a fairly innocuous example, take this recent post by Brian Tamanaha. In this post, Professor Tamanaha discusses schools with high student debt that list relatively low legal employment. In the post, he observes: “Making these extraordinary debt levels all the worse, at the majority of law schools on this list less than half the class obtained full time lawyer jobs.” It would be more accurate to add the words “within nine months of graduation” at the end of the sentence. I should note that I don’t think that this clarification would alter the core point that Professor Tamanaha is making in his post. [Update 5/1 - as discussed in the comments, using this post from Professor Tamanaha as an example wasn't particularly fair because he references nine-month outcomes elsewhere in the post. There are many other examples out there on the internet, and I should have picked another one.]
In other contexts, conflating nine-month job data with ultimate job performance might be more troubling. It is not at all unusual to see statements to the effect of “law schools are failing because only X% of graduates are getting legal jobs,” where X% is based on nine-month job data. The idea that a huge percentage of law school graduates are not getting jobs as lawyers comes up in places as varied as scamblogs to the editorial pages of the New York Times. Nine month data, however, simply does not tell the whole story of the employment outcomes for any particular graduating class. The timing of the bar exam is part of the story here. So is, I think, the economy. My anecdotal impression, which I think is backed up by the data from my study, was that many of my former students were getting good jobs, but it was taking some of them longer than it had in the past to get these jobs because of the poor economy. This phenomenon – job searches lasting longer in a poor economy – should not be surprising, at least to anyone who has tried to get a job in poor economic conditions. I graduated from college in 1991, in the middle of a very poor job market. I and many of my friends had a hard time getting jobs right out of school, especially compared to people who graduated five years later. We all got jobs eventually, and looking at the careers my college friends have had reinforces for me that it is a mistake to be unduly fixated on initial job outcomes in evaluating any higher educational program.
Taking a Closer Look at the Numbers
I have broken out my study data into a few additional categories, combining the numbers for the classes of 2010 and 2011:
Classes of 2010-11 Combined (N = 247)
Bar Pass Required (excluding solo and temp) N = 173 (70.0%)
Private firm: 91 (36.8%)
Private - In house: 12 (4.9%)
Judicial clerks: 25 (10.1%)
Prosecutors: 16 (6.4%)
Public Defenders/Legal Aid: 13 (5.3%)
Other Government: 16 (6.5%)
Bar Pass Required (including solo and temp) N = 193 (78.1%)
Solo: 18 (7.3%)
Private - temp: 2 (0.8%)
JD Advantage: N = 16 (6.5%)
Professional: N = 14 (5.7%)
Unemployed/Underemployed N = 5 (2.0%)
Cannot Locate/Insufficient Information N = 19 (7.7%)
Bar Pass Required (excluding solo and temp). These are what many people consider core legal jobs – people working in jobs that require a law license. Following convention, judicial clerks are included in this group even though in many circumstances bar passage is not required for a clerkship. I exclude solo practitioners and temporary positions from this number because concerns about underemployment can be raised about these categories. I will discuss these issues further below.
Private Firm. The vast majority of the graduates in this category are working in small firms. I would note two things about small firm work. First, most of my former students who are working in small firms are having a far better professional experience than I and my peers did in Biglaw. As just one example, I recently had coffee with a former student who is working in a small firm. He has had more courtroom experience – and significant experience at that – in one year of practice than most big firm associates have in six or seven years. Biglaw has its advantages, including higher salaries. But people shouldn’t reflexively knock small firm practice. Second, Kyle McEntee and Derek Tokaz of Law School Transparency raised an important point about the 2-10 attorney firm category – it might capture “a group of recent graduates [who] band together to start their own firm.” (p. 321). If we have concerns about graduates entering solo practice, we might have concerns about this category of graduates. It appears that only a couple of the graduates counted in my study would fit this description – recent graduates who grouped together with other junior attorneys to start their own firm.
Private – In-house. These positions are reasonably varied. The one thing that jumped out at me was the relatively large percentage of people in this category who are working for real estate title companies. My impression is that in the not-so-distant past, real estate title work was often done by attorneys at law firms. More recently, title work has shifted to specialist title companies. This may be an instance of the type of structural shift in the legal job market that Bill Henderson has discussed in various contexts. I will discuss structural changes in the job market in my next post.
Judicial Clerks. Some graduates who had judicial clerkships right out of law school have now moved on to other jobs. I don’t have comparative data to know for sure whether the number of students still in clerkships is unusually high. My anecdotal impression is that the number of people still in clerkships is fairly standard. Many clerkships on both the state and federal level last one or two years. Many others, however, last longer. It is not at all unusual in Pennsylvania for state court clerkships to last for several years. On both the state and federal levels, some clerk positions are permanent or quasi-permanent. My impression is that permanent clerkships are more common on the state level than the federal level. There also may be a good amount of jurisdictional variation on clerkship length. For example, my understanding is that all or most New Jersey state court clerkships are one year in length. [Update 5/1 - in response to the first comment below, I wanted to clarify that I didn't mean to suggest that many of our graduates get Federal clerkships - my reference to Federal clerkships was intended to be a general comment on clerkship duration. The 25 clerks in the study break down as follows: state trial court - 19; state intermediate appellate court - 3; state Supreme Court - 2; Federal District Court - 1].
Prosecutors/Public Defenders/Legal Aid. These are very good entry-level legal jobs. They don’t pay as much as firm work, but they provide excellent experience. They provide useful illustrations of why it is wrong to fixate on starting salaries. A person with three years of experience as a prosecutor or public defender typically can move to significantly higher-paying job if she chooses to do so.
Other Government. Most of the alumni in this category work for the Pennsylvania state government. As you might expect for a law school located in a state capital, Widener-Harrisburg tends to have a good number of graduates take positions with the state government. The percentages of graduates working for the state from the classes of 2010 and 2011 strike me as unusually low. A state hiring freeze significantly slowed state hiring in the last few years, and in better economic times I would expect these percentages to be higher.
Solo. Solo practice positions are tricky to evaluate. I generally agree with the view that most (but not all) people who become solos right out of law school would have preferred to spend at least a couple of years getting experience working for someone else. I know some former students who always wanted to go into solo practice – some of these people had extensive experience as small-firm paralegals that put them in a good position to open their own firm. But my impression is that these people are a minority, and that most people who start as solos do so due to a lack of other options. I therefore think it is appropriate to view solo practice, on the whole, as a less desirable employment outcome for lawyers fresh out of law school. This said, I don’t think that people who start out as solos are doomed to failure. The students who I keep in touch with who started as solos tend to be making a pretty good go of it, and their practices unsurprisingly improve over time.
Private-Temp. The two alumni in this category are both working for agencies doing document review projects.
JD Advantage. This category is highly variable, both in terms of the kind of work involved and the desirability of the positions. Here are specifics on some of the jobs in this category. Two students from each class (1.6%) are doing regulatory compliance work. I would expect this percentage to go up over time, as some attorneys move from private practice into compliance work. At least when I was working in Biglaw, it was fairly common for people to move into compliance positions after a few years of experience as an associate. Two members of the class of 2010 (0.8% of the combined classes) are doing government relations/lobbying work. One person from each class is working in legal recruiting. One graduate is working in a permanent position in our admissions office (the only “law school funded” job for the combined classes). One graduate is working as a hearing officer for the federal government. Three graduates are working in jobs titled “Law Clerk” or “paralegal”. Even these jobs vary widely – one is a law clerk position in a government agency with a history of hiring attorneys through its law clerk positions; another appears to be a fairly standard paralegal position at a law firm.
Professional. Like the JD advantage category, the Professional category is highly variable. It includes what are probably the two highest salaried graduates in the study – graduates who did other degrees after receiving their JDs (one an LLM in tax, the other an MBA) and who are now working at financial firms. One graduate is an accountant. Another is a former evening student working for the same employer she had in law school (an education NGO). Two graduates are working in policy positions for political groups. One is an organizer for an animal rights group, and another is a researcher for a prisoner’s rights NGO. Another is working for BarBri in what, as near as I can tell, is more of a professional position than a JD Advantage position. One graduate is a billing manager for a private company, and another is working at an employee benefits firm. On the government front, one is working as a regional manager for a U.S. Senator, one is in a contracting position, and another is in a policy position for a state government agency. Some of these jobs are on the underemployed end of the spectrum. Many of the others are great jobs.
Some of the jobs in the Professional category might be fairly considered JD Advantage jobs. The line between the two categories is very blurry. Where there was ambiguity, I went with my instinct but tried to err on the side of putting graduates in the Professional category. Many people before have noted the wide range of jobs that fall into the JD Advantage and the Professional categories. Some of these jobs are outstanding, and some are not so great. I have two overall impressions from looking at this data set. First, the majority of the jobs in both of these categories are good jobs, and are in areas where it is not surprising to see law graduates. Second, it seems to me that the Professional jobs are, as a whole, about as desirable as the JD Advantage jobs.
Unemployed/Underemployed. I was only able to identify five graduates who are either unemployed or working in non-professional jobs. Two of these have not yet passed the bar. The one graduate who did pass the bar and is currently unemployed had an attorney job at one point, and has had a remarkable string of bad luck on the job market. I’ve also included a fourth graduate in this category who is working as an unpaid intern in public relations, as part of an effort to get into that industry. I thought that this fit better as Underemployed than Professional. The fifth graduate in this category had been doing some work as an attorney, but now is substitute teaching on an infrequent enough basis that I put this person in Underemployed rather than Professional.
Can’t Locate/Insufficient Information. For the bulk of the graduates in this category, I simply either can’t locate the person or can’t find reliable current job information for them. One person in this category had been in a paid position with the Obama campaign, but I haven’t been able to find out what this person is doing now.
In my next post, I will discuss the argument that the legal job market is undergoing structural change. For those who don't want to wait for the subsequent posts, the whole series is available here.
Update 5/1, 2:00 EDT: In the comments, Professor Tamanaha and others mentioned that it would be useful to have some salary data. In this update, I will do what I can to provide some information about salaries. Before I get to that, I want to mention a few caveats. First, I think it is wrong as a general matter to focus on entry level salaries. When I graduated from Colgate University in 1991, I made $16,500 in an entry-level job at MacMillan Publishing in New York City. I don’t think anyone would try to value my undergraduate education by looking at that salary. Second, I think it is important to consider variations in cost of living. A given salary goes a lot farther in Harrisburg, PA than in New York City. It also goes a lot farther in a rural county in Central PA than it would in Harrisburg. My wife and I both took more than 50% pay cuts when we moved from NYC to Harrisburg, but our financial situation is better here because of the difference in cost of living. I don’t think you can generalize and say that a law graduate needs to make $X per year to service $Y amount of debt. There is too much variation in cost of living throughout the United States to allow us to paint with that broad a brush. I should add that not all Widener-Harrisburg graduates live in low cost of living areas – some, for example, go to New York, Philadelphia, or D.C.
That said, here are some thoughts on salaries for the people included in the study. I will start with the one group I have reliable salary data for – people working for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The pay scale for attorneys working for the state is available on-line. The low-end entry-level salary for an Attorney 1 is $48,822. The rest of the table shows the progression of salary ranges for more senior grades. Most entry-level attorneys move from Attorney 1 to Attorney 2 after just a couple of years. The rest of the grade promotions typically take significantly longer. Note also the wide range of salaries within each grade. It is also relevant that people working for the state qualify for the Federal Public Service Employees loan forgiveness program. Biglaw folks take note of the heading of the table – these salaries are based on a 37.5 hour work week, and a lot of Commonwealth attorneys actually work those hours.
I don’t have good salary data for other job categories. Based on anecdotes from former students and conversations with some colleagues, including our director of career development, I can make some educated guesses. I can’t emphasize enough that these are JUST GUESSES, though I think they are in the right ballpark. As I noted in the post, most of the people in the study working in private practice are at small firms. My guess is that entry level salaries at that kind of firm in the Harrisburg area are around $50,000 per year, though I think there is a lot of variation. Some could be as low as $35,000 per year, and some could be as high as $80,000 per year. There are also some graduates included in the study who are working at larger firms, and who have higher starting salaries. For in-house jobs, the sample size is lower, and these numbers are even more of a guess, but I think they would start in the $50,000 - $60,000 range. It is likely that the starting salaries are significantly lower at, say, small title companies, than they would be at one of the area’s larger employers, such as Hershey or Rite Aid. State judicial clerk salaries vary by region because they are county, not state, jobs. In a very rural area of Pennsylvania, I would not be surprised if starting judicial clerk salaries were around $32,000. In the Harrisburg area, I think that they are in the $38,000 to $45,000 range. Entry-level prosecutor salaries also vary throughout the state, probably in a range from the low $30,000s to around $45,000. Public defender and legal aid jobs probably start in the $35,000 range.
I’d repeat again that these are starting salaries. I understand that people need to make their loan payments after they graduate, and that there are some negative consequences of using some of the flexible-repayment plans that are available. Personally, I think that it is more important to focus on skill development and future marketability when thinking about entry-level jobs than it is to focus on entry-level salary. I worry a lot less about someone going on a flexible-repayment plan if they are, say, working as an assistant district attorney than if they are, say, working as a document review attorney, because I am confident that the ADA will have good employment options later. I’d like to try to get data on typical salaries for lawyers five years out of law school, though I’m not sure how to go about it methodologically. My impression is that it isn’t that hard to get to the $75,000-$90,000 range fairly quickly in private practice in this area, but I have no hard data at all to back that up. Finally, I’d repeat my point about cost of living. You can get a really nice house in this area for $300,000.
Comment Policy for this thread: I welcome pushback and criticism. I have a pretty thick skin. But please try to keep your comments civilized, and try to focus on the actual content of this post. I will delete comments that are just empty name calling. I will also delete any comment where it is clear that the comment author has not read this entire post.
"Many clerkships on both the state and federal level last one or two years. Many others, however, last longer. It is not at all unusual in Pennsylvania for state court clerkships to last for several years. On both the state and federal levels, some clerk positions are permanent or quasi-permanent. My impression is that permanent clerkships are more common on the state level than the federal level."
Is it really appropriate to talk about federal clerkships in the Widener context when -- from what I can tell -- the school has only one or two per year? (According to LST, the classes of 2010-2012 range between 0.3% and 0.8% federal clerkship placement.)
Posted by: Um. | April 30, 2013 at 09:50 PM
I intended that to be a comment on the general state of clerkship duration. You are correct that Widener-Harrisburg graduates do not get a lot of federal clerkships - one or fewer a year. All but one of the clerkships in the count in my post are state court clerkships.
Posted by: Ben Barros | April 30, 2013 at 10:07 PM
Do you have any information regarding whether those employment numbers are even accurate?
Are the subject to audit?
I am not familiar with this particular law school, but overstating employment stats a widespread and well documented problem at 3rd and 4th fire law schools?
Posted by: Who-horton | April 30, 2013 at 10:10 PM
Ben,
I think it's great that you are doing this type of follow-up. The lack of information after the standard reporting periods is a real problem. Besides what happens after nine months, we know almost nothing about 3 years out, 5 years out, etc.
You are right that the longer term numbers, while not great, look better than 9 months out, and that is good news. I have a few comments and questions.
In my post that you link to, I do in fact condition my observation on the nine month date, writing: "the percentage of the graduating class of 2011 that landed full time jobs as lawyers (at least one year duration) within nine months of graduation." I assumed that a reader would keep this in mind, making it unnecessary for me to repeat it again in the sentence you quoted.
I assume that the employment percentages you report are for full-time jobs; please clarify if that is not right.
The issue is not only whether law grads are getting jobs, but also whether these jobs pay enough to manage their debt. The average debt for the Widener class of 2012 was $123,000; to this we must add undergraduate debt and interest accrued. A substantial salary is required to manage debt levels this high. Do you have any information about salaries?
Posted by: Brian Tamanaha | April 30, 2013 at 10:19 PM
Ben,
I should clarify a couple of points. I don't expect you to know their salaries from a survey (although that would be ideal). In place of that, we can estimate salaries based upon firm size (NALP has solid data on this). Do you have information about the size of the firms graduates work in? With this information, we can get a better sense of whether the conventional wisdom is wrong.
The average debt figure I cited is from 2012, which US News publishes online. The classes you report are 2010 and 2011, which had lower average debt, although both classes probably exceeded $100,000. The point remains that debt levels this high require substantial salaries.
Posted by: Brian Tamanaha | April 30, 2013 at 10:48 PM
Who-horton, if you re-read the post, I discuss the methodology. The numbers are accurate to the best of my ability. I would note that there is a lawsuit pending against Widener (though, of course, I cannot comment on the substance of it). If you read my bio, you will see that I am a former litigator. I am also not a complete idiot. If you take a look at FRCP 26, you will see that I have a good reason to make my data as accurate as possible.
Brian, thanks. My apologies for missing that reference to nine-months in your post; I will edit the post in the morning to indicate that my use of your post of an example wasn't fair. Yes, as far as I can tell, all of the jobs other than the two temp jobs are permanent. As far as salary data goes, no, I don't have any, though I hope to get that kind of data in the future. I haven't figured out a particularly good methodology for that yet. I note in the full document referenced above, and will mention in one of the later posts in the series, that I have serious reservations about focusing on first-year salary. Lawyer salaries tend to go up, and I think it important to look at a the larger context to get an accurate picture of graduates' ability to repay their debt. One of the things that I'd like to do with this project as it progresses is to track the the progress of lawyers' careers over time. My data for older classes is not as complete as for these two classes, but one thing that is easy to see is that most people 10 or 15 years out who are in private practice have the title "partner", where most who are out only a few years have the title "associate". You also see very few judicial clerks or assistant district attorneys in the older classes. The people who are still prosecutors are the District Attorney, First Assistant District Attorney, or have some other similar senior position. This said, I appreciate the larger points you are making about student debt, and I welcome further conversation on the topic.
Posted by: Ben Barros | April 30, 2013 at 10:53 PM
Brian, thanks for the follow-up. I will look at my data tomorrow and see what I can do as far as salary ranges for some of the job types.
Posted by: Ben Barros | April 30, 2013 at 10:55 PM
Fascinating work. I think we're all frustrated by the lack of long term outcomes data. This is one small step towards gaining a better understanding of how law grads fare post graduation. That's not to diminish what must have been quite an undertaking on your part. I know our Career Services folks spend countless hours tracking down our alums for NALP and ABA reports, work that can only be more difficult as the time grows from graduation.
What would be helpful is if NALP or some other organization devoted more resources to efforts such as these.
One area that you touched upon was the issue of solo practitioners. Sure some students are committed to starting a solo practice or a practice with one or two law school buddies. But how many of these students are actually committed versus being prodded by their schools to say they are doing it? What constitutes being in a solo practice? Business cards and a rudimentary website? Or actually pounding the pavement for clients, putting yourself on attorney lists, and aggressively networking with working attorneys for small time work.
We certainly don't do it, and I don't have any evidence more than a strong suspicion that anyone else is doing it, but I suspect a small number of schools are pushing students to declare themselves practitioners to gild their stats. Just look for schools with suspiciously high numbers of students in the 2-10 category, that's where the smoke is.
What could be helpful would be to add a category of "self-employed" graduates. This would be a useful distinction that could help separate some of the wheat from the chaff.
Sorry for going on such a long tangent. I really admire the effort you put into your study and look forward to the subsequent posts.
Posted by: Steven Freedman | April 30, 2013 at 11:39 PM
Steven, thanks. I agree that it would be great if NALP, the ABA, or someone else put together some comprehensive long-term employment data. As you suggest, just getting this set was a lot of work. It was easy, though, to get data for around 75% of any given class. Even 75% data would be useful to have in many contexts.
I also agree that solos are hard to get a good handle on. I'm not sure that any schools actually prod recent graduates to do this. I'm also not sure, one way or the other, that there is much going on in the 2-10 category. But I do like the self-employed idea. Even this, though, can be a little misleading. Some recent graduates might be partners in a firm, and fit in the self-employed category, if they join a firm with a member of their family. One thing I can say for sure is that the solo category is very diverse.
Posted by: Ben Barros | May 01, 2013 at 09:17 AM
I think this is a good effort and echo some of the points above that salary data would be helpful as well.
One point of clarification on your methodology. How do you treat people who found but later lost jobs? Are you gathering data on employed people as of a particular date?
Posted by: JHY | May 01, 2013 at 09:41 AM
JHY, thanks. If someone had a job but later lost it, I am treating them as unemployed. The study aims to be a snapshot of what people are doing at a particular time period. Because of how the study was put together, this time period is best stated as the last several months. I'd also note that where possible, we tried to rely on public data like the bar website I mention in the post. It is possible that someone might have lost a job, or moved to another one, and not given updated information to the bar.
Posted by: Ben Barros | May 01, 2013 at 09:51 AM
A footnote to your observation about lawyers doing real estate title searching and clearance: In Pennsylvania the amount of title work has gone way up in recent years because of the shale gas drilling business here. Not all of that work goes to new JDs, but a lot of it does.
Posted by: Mike Madison | May 01, 2013 at 10:22 AM
Mike, I agree. I'll mention this in my next post, but two areas come to mind when I think about relatively new sources of work for lawyers - shale gas and the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
Posted by: Ben Barros | May 01, 2013 at 10:31 AM
A former student sent me an email commenting on this post. He raises a perspective we should keep in mind in this discussion, so I reprint his message below with permission (it helps to bear in mind that he landed an excellent job and is not unhappy about his law school experience):
"I just perused the Barros' post on Widener. While I applaud someone doing detailed leg work and compiling new data, his post highlights a problem I see with many of the law professors engaged in "push-back." No one takes into account the lives of the people behind the data.
The Widener class of 2011 had a 9 month employment JD required rate of 50%, and now two years later the number has increased to 75%. On one hand that is great. It is great to see people finally finding some jobs. But on the other hand, I can only imagine the miserable existence one goes through searching for any legal job for over two years. How do they pay for for rent? How do they pay for food? After seven years of education, do they move home for 12-24 months an rely on the goodwill of their parents? I know many people that stopped receiving financial support from their parents years ago.
I think it is easy to look at certain numbers and interpret them in a way that ignores the impact to the profession. Barros claims that Widener is getting "good" legal jobs. If at the end of the day, Widener ends up with good legal jobs, who is ending up with the bad ones? As you pointed out in the comments, the percentage means nothing without data on salary that tells us whether the debt is manageable.
As you also pointed out, the $124k debt number tells us less than meets the eye. That number does not include interest and undergraduate debt. It also does not include the interest that accumulates during loan deferment post graduation. The clock keeps ticking. So while 50% of Widener grads started paying down interest and principle within 9 months, another 25% had interest accumulate between months 9-24. Moreover, as I mentioned above, the job searchers have to pay for food, rent, and living expenses in the interim. I would be willing to bet a substantial chunk of those expenses are paid with credit cards.
This is toxic to the profession. Even if Barros is right - that the current job market is cyclical and not structural - "law" is still hurting in a way that is unlike any other downturn. The primary reason is debt. Even if the JD required outcomes is better than we thought a few years out (frankly, I was surprised by the numbers), the debt is climbing at an exponential rate."
Posted by: Brian Tamanaha | May 01, 2013 at 11:51 AM
Brian, thanks for posting this. I have three quick reactions. First, I take into account the lives of the people behind the data in my every day life. I remain close to many of the people included in the study. I follow many of their lives through Facebook, and see many of them from time to time in various contexts. I agree that the fact that it is taking so long for them to get a job sucks. I wish the job market was better. Second, I agree that debt is a key issue. On that front, I will post some thoughts on salary shortly. Third, even if we conclude that the current state of the legal market is the result of macroeconomic factors, we should continue to think very hard about how to improve legal education, in terms of cost and in terms of value added.
Posted by: Ben Barros | May 01, 2013 at 12:25 PM
One of the biggest problems with understanding the crisis in legal employment is the absence of longitudinal data beyond nine months. - keep up the good work in terms of attempting to mine it. Tamanaha has rightly addressed this but any data has to take into account whether or not the "jobs" are adequate to service the staggering debt carried by many recent law grads. Indeed, for a grad with 100K+ in debt, the only jobs that are truly adequate are biglaw and those represent only about 10% of entry level openings. Another point is that there is not an automatic correlation between bar passage and increased job prospects - unlike other careers, remember that so much law hiring takes place while students are still enrolled - if you miss out on that lottery, passage of the bar does not serve as some kind of golden ticket (you can't say, "hey law firms that bypassed me at OCI, reconsider me now that I've passed the bar")
another consideration is that you should have avoided comparing career outcomes from undergrad to law school - a large number of people go to college for all sorts of reasons - a portion of which are only marginally related to career goals - by contrast, law is a professional school where the vast majority attend for one reason - to be a lawyer of some sort - whether it's biglaw M&A or a small-town public defender - you go to become a lawyer and employment outcomes should be a lot higher than "college"
by contrast, college outcomes are widely varied as the trust fund kid majoring in art history may "choose" to spend a few years backpacking around Thailand - at the other end of the college spectrum is the working class kid who majored in accounting and is prepping for the CPA exam ASAP - bottom line is that "college" and law school are apples and oranges
Finally, when looking at so-called "JD advantage" or "professional" jobs, you have to take into account the additional education and/or work experience these people had prior to law school. without this examination, your data will support those disingenuous deans who love to tell kids "you can do anything with a versatile law degree" - but this tends to be true only if you have additional experience and or education - the Deans like to claim versatility for the standard K-JD liberal artist and that is just not the case
look forward to more posts
Posted by: Tyler | May 01, 2013 at 03:41 PM
after I posted I read your full post on SSRN:
as for doc review, you note that such small percentage of Harrisburg grads are involved in that sector; since you worked in biglaw you should know that doc review traditionally is heavily concentrated in a few select metro markets: NYC, DC, Philadelphia - so there are likely few Harrisburg grads working as temporary attorneys in those areas - you also need to consider that doc review is still prevalent, but in recent years has been "in-sourced" to places such as Dayton, Wheeling, Richmond and Charlotte, where the agencies can pay rates as low as $20 per hour; now if one of these outfits such as Huron decides to put a doc review processing center in York or Lancaster, things maybe a little different in Central Pennsylvania
as for the BLS data, I still can't escape the nagging feeling that you put far too much stock in the prevalence of these "non-lawyer" jobs - aside from the need to take into account the additional education/experience of people in these jobs, you also need to look at reporting bias. The person with Hill experience before law school who got a great job as a Senate staffer is far more likely to report his job status than a K-JD who is working for relative peanuts in a call center
Posted by: Tyler | May 01, 2013 at 03:57 PM
Tyler, a couple of thoughts. I really don't think that Biglaw jobs are the only ones that allow people to service debt. You note that a lot of hiring is done during law school. That is true at some schools and in some contexts. Biglaw and some clerkships are often filled before graduation. Most other legal jobs are not filled so far in advance, in part because small employers cannot project hiring needs far in advance. Fair enough on the difference between college and law school, but I think the basic point holds - you can't look only to entry level jobs to measure the monetary value of any degree. Interesting point about education and work experience prior to law school. Off the top of my head, I can't think of too many graduates who are in JD advantage jobs that are tied to pre-law school education. The exception that comes to mind is the one person working as an accountant. Also, it is true that a lot of people with JDs do non-legal jobs - the deans are not being dishonest about that. The crux of the issue is how many people get these non-legal jobs, and how good they are. In your second post, interesting and fair point about where document review jobs are located. Re: the BLS data, I don't think I'm putting too much stock in non-lawyer jobs, in part because I'm just explaining what the data do and do not show. I also don't see how reporting bias comes in, because the BLS surveys are not filled out by the employees. Push back on any of this is welcome.
Posted by: Ben Barros | May 01, 2013 at 05:24 PM
I think its great that you are challenging conventional thinking about what is being said in the legal industry and that you tried to collect data yourself. However, from a statistical stand point it is very unclear whether your sample is representative of the entire class of JD's that entered the workforce in 2010 and 2011. You can state opinions about those from your school but don't generalize it unless you can establish it is representative. It is possible to make it representative and I would suggest consulting with either a statistician or economist, either should be familiar enough with statistics to provide instruction on how to proceed.
As for challenging the conventional wisdom here are a few questions to be asked:
1)Does a legal education need to lead to a conventional job or can entrepreneurship be an acceptable route?
2)Why does the Bar Exam and the JD need to be bundled? Why not unbundle them? Meaning to be admitted to the Bar you need to have a JD and to Pass the Bar Exam, but you do not need a JD to take the Bar Exam.
3)Why not get have an LLB program in addition to the JD? Either route qualifies you to take the Bar Exam and be admitted into the Bar.
4)Do you need to be educated from an ABA accredited institution to be prepared to practice law? California Bar allows you to receive a legal education from a non-accredited institution and to take the Bar.
5)Can restricting supply solve an oversupply problem? (Restricting Supply ~ Stricter Achievement Standards for Law Schools, More Practice Experience Requirements for Licensing, Higher Cost Programs required for Law School like Clinical Offering Requirements, Anything it raises the cost of a legal education or increases the time required to obtain the license) No. This is an economics concept. Oversupply results from overpricing in the market and leads to non-consumption of available services. In this case perceived overpricing of legal services has lead to a gap in access to justice. To solve the oversupply problem lawyers should lower their prices and advertise their price reductions. They don't need to make their services free, just shave off their margins in order to take a greater share of the unmet legal need.
Posted by: Brandon Reed | May 01, 2013 at 06:30 PM
I am still somewhat unclear about how you collected your data. You state:
"We began with a list of the graduates from each class. We had some existing employment data, but we sought publicly-verifiable employment information for each person. The listings of lawyers admitted to practice maintained by state bar associations were especially helpful. As an example of how these sites work, you can go to the directory maintained by the Pennsylvania Bar Disciplinary Board and put in my name. You will be able to find basic information, including my current employer and phone number. At least two people independently searched for information for each graduate, and we followed up on any inconsistencies. If there was no publicly-available information for a particular graduate, we tried to contact that person individually."
Having looked up some random profiles on that link to the disciplinary commission, they don't state whether employment is permanent, or indeed any other characteristics about the employment. Did you in fact follow up with all graduates, or only those for whom "there was no publicly-available information?"
I will admit, I ramin somewhat skeptical of your results, partly because my "anecdotal impression" is in conflict with yours, although I admit I know nothing about Widener-Harrisburg in particular. Salary information would help, of course.
Posted by: Anon | May 01, 2013 at 07:15 PM